Re: Prioritizing Individual Sovereignty over Interoperability

On 4/30/19 5:51 AM, Markus Sabadello wrote:
> if we are at a point now where we seriously want to call a domain 
> name a "decentralized identifier", then somehow we have suddenly
> lost much of what this community has achieved in the last few years.

That's a fairly negative way to look at it that ignores the nuance in
this particular conversation.

I understand where you're coming from, Markus, and I support many of the
things that you want. In fact, I agree with much of your position with
the exception of how you're characterizing the debate.

We are not going to be able to build a bigger tent if we mischaracterize
what a subset of our community is saying. Knocking down straw man
arguments are easy, especially when you construct the straw man in a way
that avoids the point of contention. I don't think you're doing that on
purpose, but that's certainly what's being communicated via email.

The point of contention is that a subset of the community does see the
Web as decentralized (for some definition of "decentralized"). Insisting
that the Web is not decentralized, which you're doing, avoids the point
of contention.

The truth of the matter is that decentralization is a continuum, just
like privacy. We went through this debate early on in the Verifiable
Credentials work, which resulted in consensus around this graphic:

https://w3c.github.io/vc-data-model/#spectrum-of-privacy

I expect this discussion to evolve in that direction.

In the meantime, I disagree that the community has lost anything that
we've achieved in the past several years. Quite the opposite, we've
gained members in this community, we've grown RWoT larger than many of
us imagined possible, we've gained allies around the world in support of
this work... and as a result, we're trying to grow the tent.

We are not losing... we are gaining, and we will will need to continue
to keep an open mind, listen to potential allies, and be flexible,
practical, and embrace criticism... as that's what got us to where we
are today.

-- manu

-- 
Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny)
Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches
https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches

Received on Tuesday, 30 April 2019 13:41:16 UTC